Tears of the Kingdom: An amazing game, but... · 1:56am Jul 27th, 2023
And now for something not related to MLP.
For most of my life, The Legend of Zelda has been my favorite video game series, with Ocarina of Time standing as my absolute favorite game until Breath of the Wild came and essentially tied with it. So of course when Tears of the Kingdom was released, I quickly bought it and played it in virtually all of my free time until 100% completion. And while I greatly enjoyed it for the most part, there's a couple things that have been nagging at me ever since. In an attempt to clear my mind, I'm going to be posting a review of the game here.
Before that, though, a word about how much spoilers you can expect. The review is basically going to be divided into two sections: gameplay and story. The gameplay half (which will be the first half) should be safe to read unless you want to go in 100% blind. For the story half, you might want to turn away. While it's the source of the "but" in this post's title, and the ultimate reason for why I'm writing this, getting into that cannot be done without some spoilers. I'll be leaving out the game's biggest twist, and most of the remaining egregious reveals will be put in spoiler bars, but even so, proceed with caution. I will put a warning when moving from the gameplay portion to the story portion.
With that out of the way, let's begin.
Like I said before, I'm starting with the gameplay, and it's absolutely fantastic, building upon and expanding the already great Breath of the Wild while addressing several of the complaints about the original. While the map is superficially the same as the one is BotW, it's far more densely packed with side objectives and places to explore, while making it feel much more like a place where people actually live. Anyone who's watched any of the trailers aside from the initial announcement probably already knows that there are sky islands added to explore, and they've been implemented well, but the real map expansion is the Depths - a vast, shadowy underground that runs under the entire map, essentially doubling its size. The new abilities Link learns to replace the Runes from the previous game are absolute game-changers, expanding your options to the point that your imagination really is your only limit. And what of the complaints about the original, you may ask? Well, I've already mentioned how the world feels much less empty, but most of the other common complaints have at least been attempted to fix. Wet surfaces being difficult to climb? You can now make elixers that reduces the amount you slip while climbing such surfaces, while one set of armor makes you outright immune to slipping when completed and upgraded. Weapon durability too low? The new Fuse ability lets you create powerful (and more durable) new weapons by fusing base weapons with certain monster parts (primarily horns), with tougher monsters giving better parts, letting you more easily keep a stock of weapons while creating incentive to fight more and more powerful monsters as you get better weapons. The bare-bones story? This one is far more fleshed out, and while you could still run straight to the final boss after clearing the tutorial if you so choose, the game doesn't tell you where the final boss is until you've almost completed the story. Many people have said that Tears of the Kingdom makes Breath of the Wild feel like a tech demo in comparison, and I'm inclined to agree. On the gameplay side, I really have only two complaints. The first is that the replacement for BotW's Champion Abilities are pretty poorly implemented, being hard to activate when you want to and easy to accidentally activate when you don't. The other... the Koroks are back, and this time there's 1,000 of the blighters to track down.
The story portion of the review is next. If you want zero spoilers, turn back now.
For this portion, I'm going to look at the story from three perspectives: the story in a vacuum, the story as a sequel to Breath of the Wild, and the story as it fits into the Zelda timeline.
As a stand-alone story, as I've said before, it's far improved over Breath of the Wild. While it's not as deep as the stories of other games in the franchise (I suspect due to it still needing to fit with the open-world style of the game) it's still pretty good, with the biggest twist being so good that I dare not even hint at it here. However, I do have a bit of a criticism here. Fairly early into the story, you're given an objective to follow in parallel with the main story - tracking down certain locations where you can see visions of the past, similar to the lost memories in BotW. If you rush these objectives, you'll get the big twist revealed far earlier than the developers intended, which will have you viewing the rest of the story in a much different light while it still unfolds as if you hadn't learned it. But learning the big reveal in this manner is the only way that it will have the emotional impact that the developers intended. In order to get the full experience, you have to put off searching for the locations until a certain point (that I can't mention due to spoilers), then rushing all the locations before continuing the story. And the game makes no indication of any of this until it's too late one way or the other. If you want my advice without spoilers, I'd say that rushing the locations is the superior path to putting them off and letting the reveal lose impact. If you absolutely want the optimal timing and are fine with a slight spoiler, well... you should go to the locations right after completing Hyrule Castle. Also, note the symbols on the walls in the room with the Geoglyph map - they indicate the proper order to visit the locations in.. Despite this complaint, however, the story on its own is still pretty good in a vacuum.
As a sequel to BotW, however, things start to decline. The events of the previous game are glossed over at best, never brought up at worst, and while most of the characters crucial to the story recognize Link as the hero of the last game, very few others do. Now, this isn't usually a problem in the Zelda franchise, given that you're playing as different incarnations of the hero over the course of centuries (if not millennia) and three parallel timelines, but Tears of the Kingdom has you playing as the same Link as in Breath of the Wild with a time skip of maybe ten years at most. So it really doesn't make sense that almost nobody recognizes you. If this were the biggest story complaint, though, then it wouldn't bother me nearly so much as to inspire this post. Unfortunately...
The real problem comes from how this game fits into the series timeline... or more accurately, how it doesn't. With Breath of the Wild, Nintendo was clever enough to put the game so far into the distant future (10,000 years since Ganon's last rise) that it was unclear which timeline it was even part of, and could have easily been slotted into the Child timeline or the Downfall timeline. Here, however... the visions of the past I mentioned before? They are about the Imprisoning War. "Well, what's so bad about that? Doesn't that just confirm that BotW and TotK take place in the Downfall timeline?" If only that's all it did. Unfortunately, it also shows the events leading up to the Imprisoning War, including Ganondorf falsely swearing fealty to Hyrule. And what it shows... is not the events of Ocarina of Time. There's no previous incarnation of Link, no Master Sword, and the only Zelda is the TotK Zelda, who was somehow transported back to these events - which in turn is the only time travel present. In other words, Tears of the Kingdom retcons Ocarina of Time out of existence. But it gets worse than that. Not only does removing Ocarina of Time remove the timeline split, but Tears of the Kingdom also retcons the rules of time travel from a mix of Open Loops and Branching Timelines to a rigid Closed Loop model, complete with Bootstrap Paradox. This means that not only did the timeline not split just before the Imprisoning War, but there couldn't possibly be a timeline split, which deletes the games of the Child timeline (Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, Four Sword Adventures) and the Adult timeline (The Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks). But it gets worse than that. Tears of the Kingdom also retcons Demise out of the timeline. Ganondorf and Ganon aren't incarnations of the Demon King's hatred, given life by the Curse of Demise; Ganondorf is the Demon King, having attained that status upon stealing a power-amplifying artifact called a "secret stone", and Ganon is an aspect of Ganondorf that sometimes leaks out of the seal placed on him by Rauru. And no Demise means no Skyward Sword. "Wait wait wait. 'Secret Stone'? Don't you mean the Triforce of Power?" No, I don't. Tears of the Kingdom retcons the Triforce out of existence. Which eliminates every remaining game that features it (A Link to the Past, A Link Between Worlds, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages, the original Legend of Zelda, Adventure of Link). "But... but what about the end of BotW? Didn't Zelda use the completed Triforce to finish off Ganon?" Nope, that was retconned too. Zelda's sacred power isn't the Triforce... and it isn't because she's the mortal incarnation of Hylia either, that's also retconned. She has that power because she's part-Zonai. And there's one final blow to the timeline. The Ganon that emerged 10,000 years before the events of Breath of the Wild? The hero of that battle, the first chosen of the Master Sword... was a Zonai, not a Link. Link is no longer the reincarnating hero, he's just the latest in a line. Which completely destroys what little remained of the timeline (The Minish Cap, Link's Awakening). Didn't read through the spoiler section? Well, tl;dr is that the visions retcon every game in the timeline except for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom out of existence either directly or indirectly. Which is why I felt compelled to post this.
EDIT: Since writing this blog entry, the developers of TotK were asked about the apparent timeline retcon in an interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu. Their response was that the game could be a series retcon... or that it could just be that the Imprisoning War shown in the visions is actually a different Imprisoning War that occurred so far into the future of either the Child Timeline or the Downfall Timeline that the Hyrule of the pre-Switch timeline was almost completely forgotten, and the Hyrule in the visions - and by extension, the Hyrule that was saved by the Divine Beasts 10,000 years before the events of BotW and was ultimately destroyed in the Calamity - is a second Hyrule built upon its ruins. No, they never confirmed in that interview which it was. I suspect they were improvising - personal theory (and this is pure speculation) is that they did intend TotK to be a series retcon, but fan backlash made it clear to them that they couldn't afford to go that route and were asked this question before they had worked out a solution. If we were to accept this, it would fix several problems, but also open some plot holes (What happened to the Triforce? Why did the Master Sword disappear between the pre-Switch timeline and the rise of Ganon 10,000 years ago? Why are some of the original sages (Ruto, Nabooru, Darunia) remembered by name and immortalized in the names of the Divine Beasts 10,000 years ago when the people in the visions didn't even know there was a kingdom of Hyrule that existed before theirs? Why did a Zonai wield the Master Sword 10,000 years ago instead of a Link? Why wasn't there a Link in that era? And where did the Zonai come from, anyway?). Despite the plot holes, though, it's still far preferable to destroying the past timeline... assuming that this new possibility is correct (again, they left it hanging whether this explanation is so or if they really are deleting the original timeline).
...well that's annoying. This is sounding less like a Zelda game and more like a Zelda-sorta game.
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EDIT: If you didn't read the censored section of my post, don't read the censored portion of this comment.
Part of me thinks that they made the retcons to explain away most of the supernatural elements of the series as "
aliensZonai did it". It doesn't help that I could easily think of ways to make the story of TotK work while remaining faithful to the lore. Though this theory doesn't fully make sense, since Hylia still exists, as does the Master Sword and (in some capacity) Fi. It's just that (as said before) Zelda is no longer Hylia incarnate, and the Master Sword was created some time after the Imprisoning War, rather than existing long before. Then again, they may have felt that there was no way around those points, since praying to Hylia is how you upgraded you health and stamina in BotW (and still do in TotK), and the Master Sword was as close to central to the plot of BotW as you could get without making acquiring it a prerequisite for beating the game.Again, the game's still great from a gameplay perspective, and I had a lot of fun playing. Had they not included the retcons, it would unquestionably be my all-time favorite. I just personally can't get past the decision to nuke the timeline from orbit.
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I suspect they probably could have figured out some way around all of that, but getting a new game out likely took priority. Which is a shame, but there you are.
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Well, we got a fragment of an explanation. See the edit to this blog entry for details (though mind the spoiler bars if you haven't been reading those portions).
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Better than nothing, I guess.